Opinions needed...

As many of you know I have been dealing with some cannibalism in my mouse colonies. I found two very pregnant females when I was cleaning today and I am thinking about pulling them since this is the one colony where babies are always eaten, and putting the ladies together in a separate cage. I think the male is the primary cannibal here and this would perhaps prove this hypothesis. Worse case scenario is they eat the babies and then I feed them off to snakes, which is where the whole colony is headed if I cannot sort this out. If the babies survive then I will use the two moms and one of their sons and some daughters to hook up another working colony.
Does this sound feasible?
Thanks

Yep! What I like to do, is if I have to seperate a female out for whatever reason but want to keep back her babies, is try to sex the babies as early as possible, and keep two males and five females and feed off the rest. This way she's putting all effort into fewer babies and thus will raise up bigger stronger babies for breeding. This is a good thing. But I only do that if she had a HUGE litter to start. This way you have two males to choose from and whatever number you want for females in a colony. I use 1 male to four females.


Mine can have 15 to 18 in a litter once they have had a few litters. The farther along you go into breeding mice the better your colony can become if you cull heavily and watch closely what's going on. I enjoy breeding my mice almost as much as I do breeding snakes. The turn around rate is much much faster! Have fun and good luck!

I would agree with what Russell said. Sounds like the only option to produce a litter w/o something going wrong.

Update...

I pulled three pregnant females to their own pen and the very next day had live babies that are doing good so far. They are about 3 days old now. So my thought that it was the male seems to be more correct but I will wait and see with the other females he remains in with. I think when I know they are pregnant I will feed him off and go from there.
The other white colony has yet to produce live young either so i think I will feed them off and work from the weanlings I just pulled to set up another colony.